The present invention pertains to an innovative and novel vehicle cleaning system. More particularly, the present invention pertains to a system for cleaning vehicles such as railway cars, locomotives, buses and large trucks without utilization of brushes, while assuring optimum cleaning of vehicles of different outer configurations.
The cleaning of large vehicles is a difficult, yet necessary, task. Many vehicle cleaning systems are known, but the majority of these include single conduits with fixed nozzles, moving nozzles to direct spray to various points, or brushes for contacting the vehicle's surface, or a combination thereof to remove dirt. These necessitate devices for controlling the brushes and/or nozzles and their movement. Such control devices are complex and subject to frequent malfunction. Brushless vehicle cleaning systems have been developed in which liquid at a high pressure impacts on the vehicle's surface to remove the dirt. It is now known that a liquid with a specific impact pressure striking the surface of a dirty vehicle at a specific impact angle will effectively clean the vehicle surface without brushes. Nevertheless, a vehicle cleaning system having a single set of wash nozzles and a single set of rinse nozzles, which may provide optimum liquid impact pressure for cleaning of vehicles of one particular outer configuration, does not provide satisfactory performance on vehicles of different outer configurations. Large fleets of vehicles, such as those of railroads, bus companies and trucking companies, generally include vehicles of a number of different outer configurations. Since such a high pressure brushless vehicle cleaning facility cannot provide uniform application of liquid at the specific impact angle and impact pressure on vehicles of every outer configuration, it cannot adequately clean all of the different vehicles in such a fleet. As a consequence, in the past it has been necessary to compromise the various optimization criteria in an attempt to develop a vehicle cleaning system for cleaning vehicles of several outer configurations. Such compromise has, of course, resulted in the development of vehicle cleaning systems which do not adequately clean any vehicle and which are prone to maintenance problems because of their complexity.
The large scale cleaning of large vehicles requires use of significant quantities of water and, likewise, develops significant quantities of waste liquid. The waste liquid contains different types of contaminants. Thus, for example, some of the waste liquid may include unemulsified oil. Other waste liquid may include emulsified oil. Sand, fine gravel, iron oxides and other forms of dirt may be included in some of the waste liquid. These different types of waste liquid may best be processed by different sets of equipment and techniques; yet, heretofore, vehicle cleaning systems which may have included waste liquid recycling have generally combined all the waste liquids and treated them in a single set of recycling equipment. Such an arrangement makes the recycling process very difficult and does not fully remove contaminants with the desired efficiency.